STAR OF OCEANIA. SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
Thunder and the supertanker’s increased rocking awoke her.
Salma Bahmani sat up abruptly as lightning flashed through the single porthole of her stern cabin four levels above the engine room.
But there was something else.
A feeling …
She jumped off her bed, landing on the cold tiled floor while reaching for her Beretta 92FS wedged under the mattress.
But her fingers never touched it.
Her cabin door burst open. A bulky figure backlit by the passageway and clutching a pistol fitted with a sound suppressor fired into the bed. The mechanical noise of the semiautomatic blended with the spitting sounds ripping through the mattress, striking the floor.
She rolled away in the semidarkness, surging to a deep crouch next to the door. Cocking her right leg, she snapped it toward the side of the intruder’s knee, heel up and toes pointed down.
The side kick connected, but the man was large, strong. He staggered back, regaining his footing, shifting the weapon toward his left and firing again.
Remaining low, the smell of gunpowder tickling her nostrils, Salma pivoted on her left foot, shifting out of the way. Two rounds struck the wall where she had been a second before.
Whirling toward him at waist level, she tightened her right fist, uppercutting his groin. Surging to her full five-seven height, she followed with a palm strike to his solar plexus.
The man screamed, dropping the weapon, a black Makarov, and sending it skittering under the bed.
Bent over, he stumbled back into the corridor, tripping over Fahkir, the guard she had posted outside her cabin. He fell on his side by the blood pooling around the young Pakistani’s head.
Salma rushed through the doorway as the man, whom she now recognized as Viktor, the large Ukrainian cook, managed to get up while unsheathing a shiny knife. He clutched it like a professional, with the serrated blade protruding from the bottom of his right fist.
He turned sideways, grimacing in obvious pain but very much still in the fight, narrowed eyes measuring her.
She also turned sideways, keeping most of her weight on her rear leg, hands in front as they circled each other. The man was a bear, over six inches taller than Salma and twice her weight, arms as wide as her thighs.
He moved first, thrusting the blade from left to right in a wide arc aimed at her neck before driving it vertically toward the abdomen.
Salma shifted like a shadow, missing both strikes, her eyes not on the glistening blade reflecting the overhead fluorescents but on the Ukrainian’s torso, which telegraphed his intentions.
Viktor attacked again with the same behead-and-gut double move.
This time she stepped into the strike the instant the tip of the knife rushed an inch past her neck. Her right forearm blocked the offending wrist before he could reverse the thrust and drive it down her belly.
In the same fluid move, Salma grabbed Viktor’s wrist with her blocking hand and twisted it, forcing it between her and his body while turning the elbow. She struck it with the heel of her left palm while shifting her weight forward into the blow.
Bone cracked. Cartilage snapped.
The Ukrainian screamed and dropped the knife while stepping back, staring in visible horror at his arm bent backwards, useless.
Salma exploited the distraction. Pivoting on her left leg, she swirled like a ballerina in a deadly pirouette, building momentum to offset her smaller mass. Bringing her right arm around, she chopped his throat with the edge of her hand, snapping the larynx.
Viktor fell to his knees, left hand reaching for his collapsed windpipe, staring up at her in disbelief as his face turned white. He collapsed next to Fahkir, his mouth wide open, gasping for air.
Rushing back into her stateroom, she put on a pair of sneakers and snagged the sound-suppressed Makarov from beneath the bed. Counting four rounds still in the magazine plus one in the chamber, she tucked it in her jeans against her spine. She reached for her Beretta, which she always kept fully loaded, fifteen rounds in the high-capacity magazine plus a sixteenth chambered.
Clutching it in both hands over her right shoulder, muzzle pointed at the spaghetti of pipes and wires layering the ceiling of her sleeping quarters, she stepped back into the hallway and over the bodies. Her narrowing stare landed on the yellow bulkhead at the end of the long corridor. White light shimmered from fluorescents wedged in between more ducts and cables running the length of the compartment.
Salma covered the hundred feet in ten seconds.
The vessel swayed in the storm. Lightning gleamed through portholes. Thunder clapped outside.
She pushed the watertight door designed to seal off this section of the structure in an emergency, and reached the large stair landing.
The commotion one level above her, which sounded like a heated argument, echoed down the structure in between sporadic thunder, making her look up. But her immediate priority was to protect Dr. Atiq Gadai’s fission-type bomb in a trunk locked in a supply room four levels below.
She headed that way, down four flights of stairs to the large landing overlooking the cavernous engine compartment, nearly five stories high.
Massive diesels powered colossal drive shafts amidst more pipes, wires, and other machinery. Lights blinked, generators whirred, assorted equipment hummed, inducing vibrations on the metal structure. In the middle of it all stood the control room, a large glass compartment filled with monitors, computers, and other hardware. Three operators in bright orange jumpsuits moved about, turning knobs and keying in commands. One talked on the phone, probably to the bridge amidships as the crew worked in unison to maneuver the vessel through the storm.
And apparently completely oblivious to whatever was happening in her world.
One of them looked up through the glass partition and waved. It was Johan, the chief engineer who had already asked her twice to his stateroom since departing Karachi a week ago. Although the Norwegian was handsome, Salma didn’t need complications in her historical mission, delivering a nuclear bomb to Houston and detonating it inside the shipping channel.
But it now seemed like complications had found her.
Hiding the Beretta from view, she forced a smile and waved back.
The smell of lubricants and diesel struck her like a moist breeze as Johan returned to his work and she inspected the scenery. It all looked as it should for the midnight shift, with the added complexity of a South Atlantic storm that she’d heard Captain Sjöberg mention at dinner.
Salma was covertly a nuclear terrorist, but overtly she headed the team contracted by the Norwegian shipping company to provide security for the trip, in particular while cruising down the treacherous east coast of Africa. And that gave her a seat at the captain’s table with an eclectic group of seamen contractors, mostly Norwegians plus some Eastern Europeans and a couple of Africans. There she would get caught up with the latest information on their journey. But tonight the incoming storm had taken second seat to the Bagram Airfield nuclear attack and the video released by Ibrahim al-Crameini. It was all everyone could talk about.
She sighed. The realization that Dr. Gadai’s devices actually worked only added stress to her situation.
Refocusing her thoughts, she stared at the walkways flanked by guardrails covering the perimeter of the noisy chamber. They connected to lower catwalks through a series of stairwells built into the walls on both the port and starboard sides of the spacious compartment. And they continued all the way down to the main floor of the engine room.
But Salma didn’t need to go that far. She stopped just one level below and approached a bulkhead that led into another corridor, this one longer and wider than the one for her quarters.
She inched open the heavy door and froze when spotting the body of Saj, another one of her men. He had been shot behind the head, execution style, halfway down the passageway, near the room he was posted to guard, marked EMERGENCY SUPPLIES.
The bright yellow bulkhead door leading to it was wide open, swinging slightly back and forth as the supertanker weathered the storm.
Controlling the anger constricting her throat, Salma stepped into the corridor, the business end of her Beretta pointed straight ahead. She broke into a run, covering the distance in seconds and tiptoeing past the expanding circle of blood around Saj’s head.
I must have just missed the shooter.
Quietly, she peeked into the compartment.
Another Ukrainian cook stood next to a Nigerian janitor. Their backs were to her while they noisily worked a crowbar under the lid of a large metallic trunk chained to a pair of steel columns in the rear of the large stateroom.
She almost fired with her Beretta but opted for the sound-suppressed Makarov. In spite of the storm and the noise in the engine room, she feared the metallic structure might telegraph the reports across the ship.
Retrieving the Russian-made semiautomatic, she aimed its bulky sound suppressor at the Ukrainian. Exhaling, she squeezed the trigger.
The weapon responded with a barely audible spitting sound. The cook fell forward over the trunk while his Nigerian counterpart began to turn around, left hand reaching for the pistol tucked in his pants, by his belly.
But a 9mm Makarov round sprayed his brains against the porthole behind the trunk as lightning forked through it, followed by thunder.
Salma put both guns away, the Beretta tucked in front and the Makarov against her spine.
Shoving the men aside, she inspected the trunk, running her fingers around the edges and over the digital keypad, verifying the bastards had not damaged it.
She entered the access combination, releasing the magnetic locks.
The spring-loaded mechanism slowly lifted the lid, exposing the five-foot-long gun barrel housing the fission material, the trigger mechanism, the embedded computer, and a battery pack good for a month.
She stood there a moment, satisfied that Dr. Atiq Gadai’s work was undamaged. Closing the trunk, she gave the dead men another look, noticing the radio strapped to the Nigerian’s belt.
Kneeling, she pulled it off, clipped it to her waist, and killed the volume. Locking the room, she double-backed to the main staircase, a hand on the railing for balance. The Oceania continued swaying in the storm, thunder roaring outside.
The stairs connected the engine room to a long corridor and the astern upper deck. She scrambled up them, reaching the top and dashing to the bulkhead double doors at the opposite end of the hallway. They led to the ship’s galley and dining area, plus a large rec room with a satellite TV, a Ping-Pong table, and assorted gym equipment.
Salma paused, peeking through the small oval windows on the doors.
Five of the six remaining members of her team were on their knees, hands behind their heads, including Azis, the large native from Karachi who was also her right-hand man. He knelt next to Omar, his younger brother.
Four men watched over them, all wielding more sound-suppressed Makarovs. Three were Serbs from the day shift—two engine room operators and a navigator. The fourth man was Benjamin, another janitor from Nigeria, who always kept to himself but who now appeared in charge. He held a radio in his other hand, similar to the one secured to her waist, while ordering the Serbians around. Beyond the group stood the dining area overlooking a set of panoramic windows offering a spectacular view of a South Atlantic gale. Whitecaps raged atop massive waves pounding the hull in explosions of water and foam.
Her mind, however, focused on the storm inside the ship as she wondered who the hell was after her weapon.
And where was Tariq, her last man?
Was he also roaming the ship like her?
If so, she could really use his help right now.
Salma felt certain she could take two of the men in the rec room by firing the Beretta and the Makarov in unison, especially if they were looking the wrong way. But she was staring at four armed men and they all faced the double doors.
As she considered her options, a short and skinny man stepped into view, walking up to Benjamin while also holding a sound-suppressed Makarov.
Tariq?
Salma stopped breathing as anger swelled in her gut at the realization that she had been double-crossed by a member of her own damn team.
And what of the rest of the crew? Was Captain Sjöberg in on this? Johan down in the engine room had not given any hint of alarm. What about up on the bridge? Did Benjamin now have control of the Oceania? Had they changed direction? Were they still headed for Houston?
Salma forced control over her many questions, and pushed aside the thought of these bastards stealing a weapon four times more powerful than the one used in Bagram. Instead, she fell back on her paramilitary training, realizing the impossibility of overtly attacking five armed men.
Slowly, quietly, she stepped away, hiding in a fire station a couple dozen feet down the hallway. Recessed into the wall, it had a clear line of sight on anyone leaving the rec room through the double doors.
She couldn’t take them all at once, but she could sure as hell pick them off one at a time.
Reaching for the radio, she keyed the Talk button multiple times, transmitting the international SOS Morse code signal. Three short strokes followed by three long ones and three more short ones.
Turning off the radio and setting it aside, she pulled out the Makarov, confirmed she had three rounds left, and aimed it at the entrance.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Two men emerged, Serbians, pushing the heavy bulkhead doors and running into the corridor, holding their Makarovs.
Salma bided her time, letting them come to her. She verified that the spring-loaded bulkhead doors had closed behind them, isolating her prey from the herd.
From her vantage point, in a crouch peering around the corner, the Serbs looked massive, dressed in the bright orange jumpsuits of engine room personnel, thick beards hiding their features. Their eyes focused on the bulkhead at the opposite end of the passageway leading to the stairs, weapons pointed at the fluorescent lights.
Salma shot them in the face from a distance of ten feet. The gun’s mechanism chambered new rounds while ejecting the spent casings.
Their corpses crash-landed on the floor, face down. Blood splattered. Weapons clattered loudly, metal hitting metal as they skittered toward her.
She frowned at the noise, tossed her Makarov and pulled out her Beretta, aiming it at the double doors. And waited.
No one came out.
Putting the Beretta away after counting to thirty, Salma stood, grabbed their sound-suppressed pistols, and verified they were fully loaded. Clutching one in each hand, she returned to the double doors, peeking once again through the small oval windows.
Benjamin now spoke loudly into the radio while pacing back and forth with apparent concern. She could hear him but could not understand, since he spoke not in English—the common language aboard the ship—but in Ebo, a Nigerian dialect.
The tall and skinny African stopped to listen and grew frustrated at the static on the radio.
Her remaining team still on their knees exchanged brief glances, hands behind their heads. But she noticed that their wrists and ankles were not flex-cuffed.
Salma considered that for a moment. She had shifted the odds a bit more in her favor now that there were three of them against one of her. Now she also felt confident that her team would get in the fight the instant she started shooting.
Still, she wanted just a bit more insurance to minimize the chance of incurring more casualties in her already depleted team. So she waited, right shoulder pressed against one of the doors, twin Makarovs cocked and ready, while observing the trio walking around her men. Beyond them, the storm raged. Lightning sparked with ferocity across the horizon, gleaming through the windows, followed by thunder.
Then it happened.
Tariq and Benjamin moved away from the group, stepping toward the dining room at the far end of the rec room, by the panoramic windows, to have a private conversation. In doing so, they turned away from the door, leaving just the Serbian navigator standing a respectful distance from Azis and the rest of her team.
Staring at the guns in her hands, she pushed her way in just enough to have a clear shot. Although she had the option of eliminating Benjamin and Tariq with her first volley, she pointed both guns at the Serb, the most immediate threat to her men.
She fired twice from a distance of twenty feet and scored two hits in the middle of his chest just as Benjamin and Tariq turned around.
Salma switched targets, firing again, wounding Tariq in the shoulder but missing Benjamin as he dropped from view behind tables and chairs. Tariq also dove for cover.
Her men reacted just as she had hoped, rolling away, dispersing.
Salma rushed toward one side of the rec room while Azis grabbed the dead Serb’s Makarov and moved to the other side, reading her mind.
Tossing the Russian pistols across the floor toward Omar and another one of her men, Salma reached for her Beretta, finding comfort in the familiar grip.
She raced in a crouch, muzzle pointed at the tables.
The fight didn’t last long. Tariq surrendered to Azis and Omar.
Benjamin, realizing he was hopelessly outnumbered, tried to make a run for the galley.
Tracking him in her sights as he scrambled across her field of view, Salma fired twice, hitting him once in the leg. The reports reverberated inside the rec room.
Benjamin tumbled, dropping his weapon, falling on his side while screaming, hands on his bleeding thigh.
Salma was on top of him in seconds, shoving the gun in his face.
“Who are you? What do you want with my weapon?”
Benjamin grimaced in pain.
Salma slapped him while Omar and Azis brought Tariq over to her.
“Why?” she insisted, swatting Benjamin’s hands away from his wounded thigh and shoving her index finger in the bullet hole.
The Nigerian urinated on himself while trembling, crying, begging her to stop.
“Tell me!” she shouted in his face, twisting the finger while sinking it to the knuckle, feeling the slug lodged against his femur.
Benjamin squealed, yelling in English, then in Ebo, and back in English.
“Boko Haram,” Tariq said, flanked by her men, a hand on his bleeding shoulder. “He is with Boko—”
She snapped her head at the traitor. “I wasn’t talking to you!”
Azis smacked Tariq in the back of his head with one of his massive hands.
“Well?” she said, removing the finger, watching the Nigerian breathe deeply before slowly nodding.
“I … am … with Boko Haram.”
Salma pistol-whipped him with the Beretta, tearing a gash across his cheek at the mention of the Islamic extremist group based in northeast Nigeria. Boko Haram also had a strong presence in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon.
“But you are Sunni Muslims!” she screamed, shaking him by the lapels. “Like us! Your leader even claimed allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. Have you no honor?”
Looking away, a hand on his bleeding face, Benjamin replied, “Your device … priceless … my people need cash for our … cause. The Nigerian government has been fighting back … we need more weapons … more infrastructure … and selling your bomb would have provided us … with the funds to—”
She struck him again with the pistol, this time across his temple, knocking him out before slowly turning to Tariq.
“Who else is involved?” she asked, standing while pointing the Beretta at his left knee.
Tariq’s chest swelled as he breathed, lips trembling, blinking rapidly, a hand applying pressure to his wounded shoulder, blood trickling through his fingers.
He would not last long without medical help.
“You will die soon,” she said, putting the gun away. “But how you spend eternity will be determined by what you say next.”
Hesitating, and while surrounded by his former comrades in arms, Tariq dropped his gaze to the floor, blood dripping by his feet. “No one else knows,” he finally said.
“What about Captain Sjöberg?” she asked.
Tariq shook his head.
“And what was the plan?”
“Take control of the ship … after securing the weapon … and killing all of you … then force the Norwegians to steer toward fixed coordinates off the coast of Nigeria.”
“And?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head before saying, “Rendezvous … with a boat … transfer the weapon to Benjamin’s associates with Boko Haram … get paid … and disappear.”
Salma looked at Azis and then tilted her head toward the galley. “Feed him to the sharks.”
“Wait!” he pleaded as the Karachi brothers dragged him away to the back of the ship’s large kitchen area. It included a wide chute to dump leftovers overboard to the schools of South Atlantic blue sharks always swimming alongside the Oceania. “I told you everything!”
“And I believe you,” she replied.
Tariq wailed as they dragged him to the galley and forced him headfirst inside the stainless steel chute. He screamed a final plea as Azis unlatched the hatch and he slid overboard into darkness.
She ordered her remaining team to help her carry and dispose of the bodies the same way, including the unconscious Nigerian plus the ones she had killed in the hallway, in her stateroom, and down in the supply room. They also gave Fahkir and Saj a burial at sea following a short prayer.
They worked quickly, finishing all cleanup tasks by three in the morning, and doing so without alerting the night crew on the bridge keeping the vessel on course through the storm.
Then Azis began to bark orders to what remained of their team, sending the three covering the day shift back to bed, his brother, Omar, to guard the supply room, and another soldier to the engine room. Azis would head up to the bridge to continue scanning the horizon with binoculars, per their contract.
Before he left, Azis asked Salma, “How do you plan to handle the captain in the morning?”
She shrugged. “By telling him the truth.”
The Pakistani’s dark eyes widened.
She smiled. “African terrorists assisted by Ukrainian and Serbian militants attempted to take control of the Oceania last night. But our team put them down … just as we were contracted to do by the shipping company.”
Azis slowly nodded. “What about the bodies?”
“Tankers don’t have a refrigerated morgue, so we tossed them overboard.”
“He may want to report it.”
She shrugged again. “So let him—as long as he keeps the ship on course.”
“Will he?”
“I believe so,” she replied. “The infidels only care about money … profits. And delivering this oil to Houston—on schedule—is their top priority. That’s how Captain Sjöberg and his crew actually get paid: per delivery. They’re not going to jeopardize that. In fact, I’ll expect them to be grateful that this didn’t turn into another Maersk Alabama.”
She paused, then added, “But, if the good captain starts to get suspicious…” She tilted her head toward the garbage chute.
Azis leaned closer to her. “I agree, though I’m beginning to think that perhaps Captain Sjöberg may have already started to suspect something.”
She frowned, also recalling a strange feeling she’d gotten when having dinner with the bearded Norwegian captain, especially after the news from Bagram Airfield. At the time, however, she thought perhaps the lonely sailor, like Johan, wanted someone to warm his bed, which Salma was prepared to do if the situation required it. But maybe she had misread him.
“I will handle the captain,” she told him. “You just make sure our men are always alert. Yes?”
“I am deeply sorry this happened. We will not be surprised again. I swear it on my children,” he said.
“Good. And be ready to take control of the bridge and the engine room if your feeling about the captain turns true. Remember, we are trained to operate this vessel, but I’d rather leave it in their expert hands until we get to our target. The next thirty-six hours will be the most critical, as we reach the Gulf of Mexico,” she replied, patting him on the shoulder. “Now go, I need to be alone.”
Azis bowed respectfully and walked away. Salma watched the giant man duck through the bulkhead while she remained in the galley.
She brewed black tea in a kettle along with a mixture of aromatic Indian spices and herbs to make Masala chai, a popular Karachi drink influenced by the strong local presence of Muhajir cuisine.
Leaning over the kettle, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with an aroma that calmed her down. It brought her back to simpler days growing up in a girls’ orphanage on the outskirts of the vast port city. Soon after, the Karachi native was recruited by the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, along with dozens of other attractive teenage orphans. Trained to honey-trap Indian businessmen and government officials, Salma became part of an extensive sexual offensive against their neighboring country. Taught English as well as the ancient art of seduction, Salma was flown into Delhi, where she distinguished herself by entrapping her marks and collecting tons of intelligence. She stole secrets of state, confidential papers, high-tech documents, and business plans. Her efforts earned her a scholarship to an ISI advanced training camp outside of Quetta, in western Pakistan. It was there that she met ISI star Malik Darzada, who developed her skills as an operative. He took her on extended assignments to Europe and America to help her understand their enemy. Malik also introduced Salma to his contacts in al Qaeda and ISIS, including Ibrahim al-Crameini and his brother, Hassan.
She stared out the large portholes along the starboard side of the galley, amused that so often people got ISIS and ISI—her intelligence network—confused. But then again, the acronyms were close enough.
The storm was finally subsiding. Somewhere out there, beyond the sporadic lightning flashes and shrinking swells, Malik and his team were aboard a second supertanker headed for New York City. His team also traveled under the clever disguise of being security contractors. The scheme allowed them free rein in the vessel and also the right to carry weapons in case they had to defend the Oceania against African pirates.
Or against African terrorists.
Malik had come up with the elegant solution to justify their presence aboard the supertankers. Many shipping companies contracted retired law enforcement or military personnel on a regular basis to provide private security for vessels traveling the dangerous waters off the coast of East Africa. So the powerful ISI chief, Dr. Atiq Gadai, had made a few phone calls and in a matter of days the Karachi Shipping Security Company, Ltd., was born. And in her particular case, the captain and his crew were even getting bonuses for accepting a woman aboard their vessel.
Salma continued staring at the ocean, recalling her last night with Malik in Karachi. She thought of their years together, some enjoyable but most quite violent, deadly, as their profession often was.
The kettle began to whistle.
Salma turned off the fire and poured a steaming cup, sweetening it with a drop of honey.
Stepping onto a large balcony alongside the rec room, she stared at an endless ocean, still unsettled in the wake of the dissipating storm as clouds parted, revealing pockets of stars.
In spite of the close call, the men accompanying her on this mission represented the best that the ISI and ISIS could provide, all handpicked by Malik from his inner circle in Islamabad. The veteran operative of her country’s equivalent of the CIA trusted no one but those who had fought with him in the field. And even then her lover and mentor was wary. If his agency could turn sons against fathers and wives against husbands, the enemy could certainly turn a brother in arms against them, as had been the case with Tariq.
Paranoia is a weapon, my dear Salma, as powerful as your Beretta.
She brought the cup to her lips and sipped the infused tea. Silver-crested waves crashed against the double steel hull of the Norwegian supertanker sailing under the Panamanian flag.
Silently, she prayed that they had chosen their vessels wisely.
Malik and Salma—along with Dr. Atiq Gadai and his scientists back in Islamabad—had scrubbed all possible venues for smuggling the tube-shaped devices into America. They had considered using small boats, driving them across land borders, flying them in small planes, or simply hiding them in shipping containers. Each method carried its own set of risks, including discovery by authorities using a variety of detection devices. It was common knowledge within the merchant shipping industry that security measures at major ports couldn’t effectively monitor the movement of goods. And especially those inside the millions of garage-size shipping containers moving in and out of ports weekly, thereby allowing exploitation of the system.
Although the concept of using shipping containers had been appealing, it had also been as predictable as using a small plane or boat, or trucking it across the border. And they felt the risk would increase tenfold after the nuclear explosion in Bagram. Therefore, they had opted to smuggle the bombs inside two supertankers, each carrying three hundred thousand deadweight tons of crude oil.
The United States imported over two million barrels a day from Persian Gulf nations. Detection devices such as gamma-ray radiography systems to scan shipping containers would be of limited use on a supertanker. The systems used cobalt-60 or caesium-137 as a radioactive source and a vertical tower of gamma detectors to create an X-ray-like image. The supertanker’s sheer size, thick double steel hulls, and large quantity of crude oil made such methods ineffective. Another detection technique, neutron activation, in which a burst of neutrons was sent into the item to be examined, would also be difficult to use on a supertanker. Neutrons that struck uranium-235 would cause some atoms to fission, releasing neutrons and gamma rays. However, neutrons fired into the oil and any produced by the fission of radioactive materials would be absorbed or simply scattered by the hydrogen atoms in the fossil fuel. Plus the large volume of oil would mitigate any gamma rays produced, defeating this form of detection.
In some ways, their original approach reminded her of the brave men who flew those planes into the American towers and the Pentagon long ago. It worked because it was not expected, at least not by those in a position to prevent it.
And that’s why our mission will succeed.
Salma watched the waves still fighting against the Oceania’s bow in explosions of foam and surf splashing over the gunwale. They receded to the backwash boiling down the sides of the structure before blending with the ship’s wake.
The American public was far more interested in the latest music video, tweet, or post from scantily dressed young whores than the impending reality of another major terrorist attack. And that suited Salma just fine, especially with the way Washington and its politically correct mind-set frowned on profiling any given group. But doing so created more bureaucratic barriers between law enforcement and terrorist cells, enabling their proliferation in recent years.
The time had now come to show the infidels just how helpful they had been with their so-called Bill of Rights, protecting her network’s activities by allowing alleged terrorists access to attorneys and lengthy trials.
Instead of simply removing their fingernails and torching their genitals, she thought, recalling Malik’s way to get an enemy soldier to confess in minutes.
Salma remembered how they had brought the bombs aboard the tankers disguised as part of their piracy security equipment. ISI moles working port security had assisted them. Trained by none other than the U.S. Coast Guard’s international port security liaison officers under the U.S. Maritime Transportation Security Act, the moles had approved all of the necessary forms, bypassing crucial inspection steps.
She smiled. The Americans had even trained her own people in their port security measures, making it all too easy to defeat them.
Salma’s mission called for detonation the moment the Oceania reached the Port of Houston’s inner canal, within range of shipping container terminals and oil refineries, and before inspection crews could come aboard.
Malik’s objective was a bit more ambitious. He would wait for his ship to dock by the Bayway Refinery at the Port of New York and New Jersey. Moles had been planted long ago in the New York/Newark Field Office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. If their deep-cover agents failed to keep inspection crews from finding the device, Malik would detonate immediately. Otherwise, he would meet up with a local contact to take the bomb to Times Square.
Salma sipped tea and regarded the ocean, but her mind traveled beyond the waves, past the dark horizon, and up the United States Eastern Seaboard. By morning Malik’s supertanker would start its approach into the third-largest port in America, and less than twenty-four hours later Salma would reach her target in Houston.
And together, they would set the world on fire.